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Art is much easier to discuss if we insist on labels and segregating it into various forms and genres. Granted, there are important differences between painting and music, between writing poems and writing songs. Yet after the destruction of New Orleans, all of these things together give us a prismatic facsimile of the city that was. In that regard we look to Lucinda Williams as well as novelist Nancy Lemann, Randy Newman and the Nevilles as well as poets Brenda Marie Osbey and Mona Lisa Saloy. Fragments of the same smashed memory are what many of us feel abandoned to, and if you love the old New Orleans, your impulse is to gather as many pieces as you can. I imagine many, many people pulled out Williams’ album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road just to hear, “We used to drive from Lafayette to Baton Rouge / In a yellow El Camino, listening to Howlin’ Wolf” and other of her songs that map her own version of Louisiana’s geography. Newman’s album Good Old Boys, with its immortal reference to the state’s university and its male students—“College men / from LSU / Went in dumb / Come out dumb too / Hustlin’ ‘round Atlanta in their alligator shoes / Getting drunk ‘most every weekend at the barbeque”—also includes his majestic “Louisiana 1927.” There, in the voice of one of those Good Old Boys, Newman sings about the great flood of that year and other less tangible means of a way of life destroyed: “They’re tryin’ to wash us away / They’re tryin’ to wash us away.” That man’s son may be the Huey Long supporter who sings hopefully elsewhere on the album of “Kingfish” and chimes in with Long’s own campaign song “Every Man a King.” The city’s chief treasure, of course, is its music; the uncertain fate of its musicians in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath added to the tragic unease. One low moment was the announcement that Fats Domino, longtime resident of the Ninth Ward, was missing. (While it may come as a shock to those whose knowledge of New Orleans has been gleaned solely from guidebooks and cable news reports, the Ninth Ward is not a giant ghetto but an historically black neighborhood containing African-American families of all classes, almost three-quarters of them homeowners.) Another was the news from the Mississippi blues label Fat Possum that one of their newest stars, Little Freddie King of New Orleans, had gone missing. But Fats was found, King was discovered to be in Dallas, and another missing son, Alex Chilton, was heard from in the Houston airport during the imminent arrival of Hurricane Rita. Chilton, a Box Tops and Big Star alumnus as well as a denizen of the Big Easy for the last 20 years, had refused to leave his house in Treme, another traditionally black neighborhood, and eventually had to be evacuated by helicopter. A survivor if ever there were one, Chilton likely weathered Hurricane Part II just fine; some damn interesting songs may emerge from the whole experience. Whatever the resulting music doesn’t tell us about the city’s psyche, perhaps New Orleans poets will. Mysteriously, historically, and unfortunately, the work of New Orleans poets, if not their lives, has been somewhat predictable and less than compelling. New Orleans has never produced the poetic equivalent of fiction writers like John Kennedy Toole, Ellen Gilchrist, Sheila Bosworth or Lemann, much less Walker Percy. Yes, for many years there was a famous, boozy poetry scene at the Maple Leaf Bar, headed by the ur-New Orleans poet Everette Maddox and chronicled in Julie Kane’s wonderful second collection, a National Poetry Series winner called Rhythm and Booze (2003). But Maddox is likely to be remembered better for his Bukowskian sorrows and his irremediable alcoholism—and alcohol’s various literary sentimentalities—than for his poems, though some are as artful and stringently beautiful as haiku. Kane’s book, however, shows that she has just begun to rev her engines. Though a 20-year resident of the city, part of her imagination remains in her native Northeast, and yet she seems truly possessed by Louisiana, whose every nook and cranny—New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Nachitoches, St. Gabriel—she seems to love. Her devotion to the villanelle—a repetitive, highly musical French form whose structure is not unlike that of a slightly lopsided waltz—tells us something about how New Orleans is best written about poetically: in forms, received or nonce; and/or in imagistically, syntactically, and musically heightened language that proves a match for what the city utters. New Orleans effuses with too much color, too much music, too many smells—too many assaults on the senses and the psyche, in other words, for unadorned free verse and/or the so-called “plain style,” which can’t do much more than mirror the melange or flatten it. A case in point in Brenda Marie Osbey. While there are many other poets whose work contains material about the city, hers is the work most truly and irrevocably steeped in its history, its demotic, and its racial caste system. Osbey has at her disposal some of the most fascinating subject matter and imagery in America: her black and Creole heritage, whose maternal side she emphasizes in Ceremony for Minneconjoux (1983), Desperate Circumstances, Dangerous Woman (1991), All Saints: New And Selected Poems (1997) and In These Houses (1998). But despite Osbey’s prolificness, her gifts as a story teller, and the enviable richness of her material and milieu, her work hasn’t deepened or matured much in the past two decades, and her failure to attend to her poetry as poetry gives us some idea why. Indeed, Osbey’s poems have never developed what one well-known reviewer, Benjamin Downing, called “that vertiginous condition of language we know as poetry”; nor has she found a form that seems fully compatible with what she writes about, depending too often on an oracular, portentous tone that too often comes across as just plain affected. †One section of “Faubourg Study No. 3: The Seven Sisters of New Orleans,” for example, opens with these less than scintillating lines: “I have heard tell of them, yes, / but I never believed the sister part. / People say they wasn’t even from here.” “Old-time hoodoo is what it sounded like to me,” she continues more promisingly, but then adding, “i never did go in for all that.” Indeed not. For exotic subjects, even when enhanced with tales of forbidden love; with the history, images, and motifs of hoodoo / voodoo / voudon; and with the most interesting and enduring of archetypal female images, cannot make a good poem unless there is a commensurate amount of verbal voodoo present. But Kane, agrees Dave Smith, longtime LSU professor and editor of the Southern Review (until his recent move to Johns Hopkins) as well as one of our country’s most prominent and masterful poets, is a writer to watch. So is Mona Lisa Saloy, winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. Her lively first book Red Beans and Ricely Yours, named after Louis Armstrong’s famous epistolary sign-off, will be available later this fall. Though I doubt that Kane and Saloy know each other, it’s significant that the latter’s book contains—guess what?—several villanelles and nonce sonnets, as well as free verse that makes use of the Whitmanian devices of the catalog, the refrain and repetition. Saloy’s language, as well-spiced as the best gumbo, sings the upbeat blues of her city. “Louisiana Log,” dedicated to Bob Kaufman, begins, “Land south of the Mason-Dixon, of Gulf waters and Mississippi tugboat sighs / Land of cane, rice, and watermelon (jungle plums), po’ boys, patios, patois, pecans, pecan pies, pralines, and papier mache masks.” These lines not only make me want to read on, they make me hungry and desirous of designing a new face for Mardi Gras. And yet, for the moment, New Orleans’ truest poet laureate is the aforementioned prose writer Nancy Lemann. The reader of her canon—The Lives of the Saints (1985), The Ritz of the Bayou (1987), Sportsman’s Paradise (1993), The Fiery Pantheon (1999) and most recently Malaise (2002), the first, third, and last brought back into print by LSU’s Voices of the South Series—will notice that Lemann is sufficiently wise to have set only one of her novels in New Orleans itself, thus giving herself ways to talk about the city and its people from the viewpoints of both the native resident and the exile. Were Lemann’s style not so absolutely singular, her lyricism so heartstoppingly beautiful, and her humor so entertaining, she would likely be bashed for some of the extreme political incorrectness in her novels. Without apology, Lemann presents families who, in the best tradition of paternalism, cannot manage their days without black domestic help, whom the families regard as near blood-kin. (Of course, there’s no telling what the various maids, laundresses, and chauffeurs think about them.) Lemann adores men and seems to have little interest in women except as wives and ditzy debutantes; she is almost waif-like in her lack of self-determination and her willingness to allow her romances shape her destiny; and she depicts with unreserved love and admiration the usually silver-haired Live White Males who run the CBD, or Central Business District, from their banks and law offices. These potential objections gotten out of the way, one cannot help but notice the extremely serious (and for some readers, more psychosocially resonant) theme of alcoholism that permeates many scenes in her novels. The theme also courses through Kane’s poetry, as well as that of newcomer Alison Pelegrin in her uneven but worthwhile debut The Zydeco Tablets (2002). This should come as no surprise, considering not only New Orleans’ culture but also that of the Delta and Memphis and much of the Deep South. The last I heard, Nashville lawyers still grow grumpy dealing with those they view as their hard-drinking and lazy-ass cousins to the west, who can’t even be bothered to show up for work in their Brooks Brothers worsteds and seersuckers and linens until 10 o’clock. What’s true—or even exaggerated—for Memphis is doubly true for New Orleans. How I wish for more space here to offer excerpts of Lemann’s prose long enough to give a taste of what makes her an absolute genius. Her novels have plots, yes, but they are primarily driven and unified by the use of repeated phrases or verbal motifs, some of them Southern clichés—hearts are constantly “breaking into a million pieces on the floor,” for example—that she, like Tennessee Williams, somehow turns to poetry. Her gifts hardly withered when transported to the desert country of southern California, the setting of Malaise, a grown-up’s novel if ever there were one. “It's so godforsaken, so historical, and so pure,” she writes of the sandy wasteland surrounding her, “that you are curiously elated. It may be called Death Valley, but the minute you get there you are subsumed by a vast and incongruous gaiety.” We will have no shortage of literary blueprints when we come to build our New Orleans of the mind. The latest is Roy Blount Jr.’s just-published Feet on the Street, the Vanderbilt alumnus’s humorous testimony to a city well-loved. It’s a poignant but highly enjoyable experience to read the Blount book in tandem with one of the classic collections of writings on the city, 1992’s New Orleans Stories, edited by John Miller and Genevieve Anderson with a foreword by frequent NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu. Here we have the granddad of all New Orleans writers, Lyle Saxon, with an excerpt from his Gumbo Ya-Ya Superstition, along with Audubon, Thackeray and Louis Armstrong as well as more usual suspects like Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Toole. Far more pedestrian in its writing, but equally fascinating, is An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature by Craig E. Colten, just published by LSU. One of the most interesting books about New Orleans to be published in the past five years, however, isn’t a guidebook or a novel or a book of poems. It is The Brothers Neville, an oral biography of the Neville Brothers from 2000 edited by David Ritz. From their childhood in the New Orleans streets to their difficulties with drugs to their re-embrace of Christianity, the path each brother has been on is different but interestingly parallel—almost like a giant song, with harmony laid upon harmony. Such voices will be a small but sustaining comfort as New Orleans reassembles its many pieces, even if many of them fit together peculiarly by outside standards. Michael Brown, the much-excoriated former head of FEMA, was revolting in his refusal to accept any blame he might bear in the man-made tragedy that followed Katrina. Nevertheless, he had a point when he called the state of Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular “dysfunctional.” (As Randy Newman puts it, “New Orleans is not the place to go to get your car fixed.”) Why, after all, did the city’s founders elect to build one of the country’s most important port cities on land lower than the waters surrounding it? There are many answers to that question, and many explanations of how the situation became worse with the destruction of Louisiana’s wetlands and the construction of ever-higher levees. And yet that testifies to a crucial part of the character of the city, even of its literature: its stubborn immutability. Nancy Lemann’s critics protest that she says the same thing over and over about nothing of great import. This accusation that has been hurled at writers as variously great as Jane Austen and Peter Taylor, so no one can accuse Lemann of keeping bad company. It’s not irrelevant to mention here that all three writers, as well as many others good and great, have been dismissed by the phrase “novelist of manners.” But since when don’t manners matter? If those who run our country loved its every square inch as much as they claim—and not just its oil and other nonrenewable and thus most valuable natural resources—they might not have ignored the dire situation in New Orleans after the levees broke, offering initially little more than faint encouragement, vague promises of relief, and rote sympathy murmured from an airplane high over the city. Southerners have a quietly damning phrase for such disregard: just plain bad manners.